Pressed for time ...

Sometime in December Comcast (my ISP) will no longer support the old URL format of http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ncherry/index.html but will support the newer URL format of http://home.comcast.net/~ncherry/index.html. Note that there are 2 changes. The first is the change from mywebpages to home and the second is the addition of the tilde (~) to the users name. Now to be fair to Comcast they announced this change in Jan. 2004 and the change will be final in Jan. 2005. In the mean time both URL formats will work. So where is the problem? Well I now have 4 months to seek out and change every page that references the old URL format! OK, so it's my own fault for waiting (no sympathy for you! ;-). But it still a lot of work (which I think I can get done in the given time). Actually I did start, I've changed my newsgroup and email signatures to reflect the change. Now it's time to seek out and change every one's link references to my pages. Hopefully it won't be as bad as my change from Worldnet to @Home and then to Comcast. Those were abrupt changes.

So how is this related to Home Automation? Well for one thing I keep a local copy of my pages on my local server and I post it to the various sites when changes are made (yep, it's automated!). Remember that Home Automation isn't just about automating appliances. It's also about automating various processes around the home such as information management (the promise of putting together your own online newspaper from information gathered off the 'net). The maintenance of these pages is a bit difficult. Currently I have about 100M of HA stuff distributed across several sites (I'll get around to adding the links to this BLOG page a little later when I figure out the format I want to use). I'm hoping that this BLOG will allow me to jumble my ideas and let me think of new ways to put them to use. I still need several tools but I'm getting there.